


All Is Fair

by duckiesinaline



Category: Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types, Tron: Legacy (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-30
Updated: 2011-10-30
Packaged: 2017-10-25 02:44:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckiesinaline/pseuds/duckiesinaline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All is fair in love and war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Is Fair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wtb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wtb/gifts).



> This was directly inspired by [Winzler's comment here ](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/404760)along with [her illustration here](http://307020.com/post/12091882496/so-this-is-totally-self-indulgent-ok-but-i-used), and was deliberately set in the same universe as her fic, [Home](http://archiveofourown.org/works/165898/chapters/241552). Go read it - it is magnificent.
> 
> Please note the rating!

"Are you sure this is the place?"

Tron didn't bother dignifying that with a verbal response, and okay, Sam totally deserved That Look for questioning whether his security chief knew where a set of coordinates led to. But as he turned a slow circle with his hands braced upon his hips, Sam thought that he was justified in appearing just a _little_ skeptical as he was able to catalogue one craggy gridscape outcropping after another ... and little else.

"This is where all the reports lead to," Tron finally betrayed his own bewilderment as he clipped his lightcycle baton in place, brow furrowed as he made his own survey of the landscape. "Deviations were few and obvious. All in all, the vectors were surprisingly consistent."

For the last ten microcycles now, they had been receiving reports of scattered gridbug activities. Handfuls of scouts, blundering aimlessly about. One or two small swarms, but nothing that even a lone security program couldn't handle on their own. The threat level was so low that it would ordinarily have never been kicked up to Tron, except that some statistical analysis program had noticed a pattern to the reported locations and implied vectors, and they all seemed to point to this one spot in the outlands just beyond city limits.

Even then, Tron and Sam wouldn't have been the ones to personally chase down this particular bogeyman, except that Sam had been dying of cabin fever for the last six microcycles, and when his frustration alone managed to set all the lights to flickering, Tron had dropped his half-voiced objection and wordlessly extended a baton.

"I dunno, maybe they're just attracted to this place for some reason? Maybe it's like honey or flowers or something ... " Sam scuffed a foot against the arid ground.

"Honey ... ?" Tron echoed distantly, his attention obviously elsewhere. Completely still now, head tilted, he looked like he was trying to listen in on an encrypted radio band, and Sam wondered just how far Tron's access to system reports extended. He barely resisted the urge to bring up a sticky note right in front of the security program to remind himself to do some digging later.

"Yeah, honey, like in flowers. Bees - they're like bugs - they fly around looking for honey all the time - " Sam began to ramble, kicking his toe at the ground again as it began to seem as if they had been on a wild goose chase, when Tron's gaze abruptly sharpened - over his shoulder, behind him - and Sam had only managed to half-turn when a disc streaked past his head and impacted something close enough that he was momentarily blinded by the energy discharge.

"Jesus - !" Sam stumbled back from the shower of voxels, blinking and hoping he didn't have gridbug in his eye as Tron strode up, one hand casually outstretched for the returning disc. "Was that really necessary?"

"It was almost close enough to land on your shoulder." Tron had his game-face on as he crouched over the gridbug's remnants, and Sam swallowed back his first knee-jerk response as he registered the banked tension in the program's voice.

"Hey, man, what's the problem?" he asked instead, beginning to wonder if maybe they should have gone to the arena instead. "It was just one, and you got it - "

"But I don't know where it came from," Tron interrupted witih clear frustration this time, straightening. "It was just suddenly _there_ \- "

Sam rolled his eyes. "Hey, I'm a user and _I_ didn't even know it was there, so la la la, let's just call it and - " And ... there was movement. Just beyond Tron. Something small and wriggling on the ground, and Sam squinted as he slid one step, two steps closer. "Tron ... "

Tron didn't comment this time, simply made a warding gesture as he stalked forward, disc cocked. Sam practiced selective blindness as he undocked his own ID and crept up beside his security chief, taking full advantage of Tron's distraction.

As soon as he was able to resolve the details of what they were looking at, though, all thoughts of trolling scattered. "What the hell ... "

It was a gridbug. _In_ the ground. Three legs were scrabbling frantically at the rock with a barely audible _scritch-scritch_ , and Sam felt his stomach turn over as the thing heaved a little further into view, another leg unfolding from beneath it.

For once, Tron looked as unsettled as anyone should be. "Sam, get back ... "

Sam hardly needed the cue. He was already stumbling backwards when there was a disconcerting _pop_ ... and it was as if the gridbug had been _catapulted_ because Sam abruptly had a face-full of angry whirring and there was absolutely no surveillance footage that could prove if he had screamed like a little girl or not, and the only sure thing was that he swung his disc and was pelted by a shower of gridbug parts yet _again_ -

Reflex flicked his fingers open, and the disc streaked through the cloud of dimming voxels. It hit the ground where the bug had emerged and rebounded - thirty degrees wide of what its trajectory should have been, as if it had kicked an invisible angle. Sam had a split-second to thank Tron's warrior reflexes as the program's free hand shot out to catch the disc, else the security chief might have been less an ear ... and before he could ask what his disc had hit to throw it off-kilter, there was a bone-shuddering rumble, a heart-stopping _crack_ ... and the ground split open beneath Sam's feet to send him free-falling down.

This time, he felt fully justified in screaming like a little girl.

That same glitchy buzz, magnified ten times over, chased him down. Glittering shards of derezzed rock seemed to hover next to him, and Sam grunted as something smacked into his back and hip, flipping him like a tossed pancake. He had a single, dizzying view of a vast, dark space yawning below him, filled with glittering points of light that flitted and swooped in nauseating patterns ... and then something clamped around his waist, jerking him to the side with an abruptness that he could have sworn dislocated his spine in two places. Actinic lines traced geometrically-precise shapes to his right, surfaces flashing into existence as quickly as the ray coordinates could load, and just as his hindbrain registered the rough shadow of potential death approaching all too rapidly from below, a lightcycle's familiar, comforting whine built in his ear.

[Secure peripheral attachments] was tapped out directly against his stomach, and the muscles beneath that touch automatically tensed just before the lightcycle howled, and his perspective angled back with a jerk ...

They landed amidst a roar of crashing breakers, the screech and squeal of the cycle's wheels all but drowned by the scatter of bus-sized boulders as they shattered and liquified upon the cavern floor. For a breathless moment, Sam felt like he had been dropped directly into a fireworks display gone awry, buffeted by sound and light while he clutched desperately at a too-smooth fairing and the iron grip constricting his middle. One elbow banged painfully off a sleek black surface when they abruptly jogged right and a leg fell painfully numb up to the knee when it scraped across the ragged floor, but just as Sam was beginning to feel like he was either going to suffocate or throw up, the cycle tipped, rear skidding out, and finally came to a teeth-juddering stop.

"Sam?" Tron asked anxiously as he finally relaxed his hold, and Sam slumped to the ground, ungratefully happy to hear that the program at least sounded winded.

"Just ... " he gasped before he had to stop and motion for extra time instead, leaning over to press his forehead against a knee and gulping down great lungfuls of air.

"I wish I could give you all the time you need, Sam, but I think it's imperative that you constrain yourself to critical processes only for now."

Tron has interacted with users long enough that it was rare for him to lapse into program-speak without other programs around to encourage him. That alone was enough to drag Sam's head up, and after he blinked blearily a few times to clear the last of the after-images from his vision, he felt his breath catch for another reason entirely.

There were still the occasional streams of crumbled voxels tumbling over the lip of the sinkhole, grinding echoes of shattered outlands crust settling upon the uneven floor. While the space was not even half as big as the stadium, it was still more than sizable enough to be labeled a cavern ... and in the dim light streaming through the jagged tear overhead, it was filled with the angry buzz of gridbugs, their numbers increasing with every heartbeat.

"The collapse took out a good number of them," Tron murmured as he slowly handed Sam's disc back and tightened his grip on his own, gaze intent as he rapidly tallied the threat. "There is a hive in a fissure to your left. I can keep them away for now - you need to find us a way out of here."

There was a vertiginous moment in which Sam wondered how this place existed in the first place - had the gridbugs managed to _eat_ this out of the bedrock as they incubated, trapped, here? - before he scrambled to his feet with the help of the lightcycle. His left foot was tingling painfully as the nerves came back to life, but he flexed it experimentally with gritted teeth and it obeyed, for the most part. "Got it. I'm gonna head left ... think that's the only spot that'll work." The rubble was piled highest there, and while the top of it still fell short of the cavern lip by a few meters, the wall might hold enough hand and footholds for them to climb the rest of the way ... if they could win themselves enough space from the gridbugs in the meantime.

Tron nodded shortly as he leaned over his cycle, disc held low and wide. "Go," he said simply as his helmet folded over his head.

Sam needed no further encouragement. He lurched forward, trusting his back to the security program as he broke his baton and landed with a rougher jar than usual on the uneven ground. Even with the outlands modifications, the cycle was having a tough time on the cavern floor, and a corner of his mind pondered the merits of a Grid dirt-bike equivalent as he pushed for as much speed as he dared.

He winced at the first burst of light, but resolutely ignored the rest as Tron clung gamely to his rear. The sharp, clean whine of lightcycle and disc weapon washed back and forth behind him as Tron cleared a corridor through the feverish buzz of the swooping gridbugs. Only once did Sam have to duck and swipe at a kamikaze himself, just before Tron put on a burst of speed and wiped it out with a particularly vicious undercut. Gratefully, Sam focused on the rapidly diminishing distance to the rockpile, and at the last possible second, swept his cycle into a skidding stop, derezzing it as soon as he had bled off enough speed to hit the ground running.

He barked his shin painfully as he leaped over the first rocky detritus, but barely registered the distraction as he scrambled hand-over-foot for the makeshift hill's zenith. Another explosion of voxels just behind him proved that his watchdog was still on the job, and he redoubled his efforts, breath burning painfully in his lungs as he tried to remember every bouldering tip and trick he had ever picked up.

 _Almost there_ , he prodded himself encouragingly when he was only twenty feet from the top, and his heart pounded hopefully as he was finally able to make out the wall and saw that it was as rough-hewn as the rest of the cavern. If they could make it there, the climb would be short and easy enough for one to defend while the other ascended, and then they would be out of here and can go back for reinforcements ...

The flickers of light were so faint, at first, that he didn't even notice them. Much more subtle than the extravagant deaths of the derezzed gridbugs, they were just an intermittent glimmer and glow between the cracks of the avalanche, like fireflies hiding in the grass, stirred up by a foot trampling through. The first warning that something was amiss was a shiver that sent him stumbling, and he automatically leaped up for a more stable handhold, thinking that he had simply stepped on loose shale, before a second shudder finally brought him panting to his hands and knees. Wild-eyed, he stared at the now-steady glow peeking up from beneath, and only a grip landing on his collar and yanking him unceremoniously backwards saved him from a veritable _geyser_ of outlands debris and gridbugs that exploded from where he had been crouched just a nanocycle before.

He didn't even have the breath to curse as he automatically curled into a ball, arms wrapped over his head for protection as he went bouncing back down the rapidly shifting slope. Only when he stopped feeling rocks pelting down on him did he fling out an arm and leg to halt himself, finally fetching up against a boulder with a wheezing groan, eyes squinted as he waited for his sense of direction to settle down. "Tron - ?"

A cough, and thankfully, somewhere near, he heard, "Here."

"What happened - " he croaked, levering himself up and blinking disbelievingly at the remains of the hill they had been attempting to scale.

"The gridbugs ... they must have tunneled underneath," Tron grunted, crouched on one knee with an arm braced upon the other.

"Is that - that's not normal behavior, is it?" Sam stuttered, freezing at the thought that maybe gridbugs too can evolve and adapt before he noticed the crack and furrow of tell-tale damage angling across the program's left collarbone. "Tron, you're - "

"It's not that bad yet," Tron dismissed, and Sam might have been more reassured if the program hadn't needed to brace a hand in order to push himself back to his feet; a sign tantamount to a stagger for the normally fluid program.

"The hell it isn't - " Sam began before a darting point of light reminded him that they didn't have the luxury of chit-chat, and he swung his disc - thankfully, still attached in spite of his ungainly tumble - taking out the bug that had been targeting Tron's back. "All right, fine, what now?" he gritted, giving in to the inevitable as he shifted smoothly into the role of defender this time, giving his security chief whatever time he needed to recover and assess their situation.

It was a mistake, in hindsight, giving Tron room to plot. The fine hairs on the back of Sam's neck rose at the thoughtful, "Hmmm ... " which resulted; a sound that he was beginning to associate with shattered lightwalls and jammed lightcycles. "Tron ... " he began warningly.

"We need to take out the hive," came the decisive answer, and Tron had already turned around and hopped the last few feet to the cavern floor by the time Sam shook himself out of his gawp.

"Wait - wait, what the fuck! How did you get from - hey, we need to get out of here and get reinforcements, not take on the queen mother - !" Sam scrambled after him, sending a few half-hearted swings after the braver bugs that came to test their reactions while the swarm regrouped.

"We will not be able to formulate an escape for those very reinforcements if they continue to swarm as they do, and in order to prevent them from swarming as they are doing, we need to remove the generator which is spawning their replacements."

Sam wondered sourly if Tron had been getting into Quorra's library of classics. All that was missing from the end of that deduction was a supercilious, _Elementary, my dear Watson._ "And just how're you gonna take out the entire hive when we've been barely able to hold our own against the babies - "

Tron rolled his left shoulder, testing its range of motion, and apparently satisfied by its current parameters, threw Sam one of those half-cocked grins that made him alternately want to jump his security chief's code or strangle him. "Cover me."

Sam only had time for a choked, "You crazy sonuva- " before he was scrambling to rezz his own lightcycle into being, Tron already speeding far ahead of him at full throttle.

The hive looked like a gigantic spiral shell, washed up on a shore and still half-buried in the sand. Nestled as comfortably within the rocky wall as if it had grown directly from the code there - well, hell, maybe it had - it loomed at least two stories high, its whorls striated with regular bandings of earthy hues. If it hadn't been for the fact that gridbugs were regularly crawling or flying out of the wide mouth like flies from a corpse, it might have been a prime specimen for any beachcomber's collection ... and Tron was angling directly for it, riding his lightcycle at a speed over the uncertain terrain that even Sam would label as reckless.

Even though he could hardly fault the results of recklesness - if past experience was any indication - it still didn't do anything for the state of his emotional wellbeing as he struggled to just keep up with the program, and he nearly missed it when Tron pulled a maneuver that he could have sworn was outside the lightcycle's operational limits and _just_ managed to jump the lip of an angled slab to go streaking up the natural ramp ...

The lightcycle shot out into empty space.

Sam swerved to avoid running into the edge of the same monolith, heart caught in his throat, head angling back to follow the cycle's astonishing, unlikely flight. As if sensing their danger, gridbugs belatedly swooped in from all corners of the cavern, ignoring Sam completely as they tried to converge on the vehicle. The traceries of blue energy chasing each other deep within the cycle's belly flared and burned, shining like a star as they were coaxed into overload. Silhouetted, Tron curled his legs up at the apogee, feet braced against the seat as the cycle began its inevitable, downward glide ... and then leaped.

Sam rolled his cycle. Flinging all his weight to the right and tucking the same-side leg up just before it was sandwiched between vehicle and unforgiving ground, he gritted his teeth and tried to tuck himself behind the machine's bulk as they skidded and bounced across the ground. A nanocyle later, Tron's lightcycle hit the hive - and everything exploded like a mini nova, free energy spiking like lightning across the wall and floor, a wavefront sweeping across the cavern fast enough that it made Sam's ears pop. Breath rasping in his throat, he braced himself as soon as he had come to a stop, clutching his disc in half-numb fingers as he peered over his lightcycle's engine ... only to be forced to squint at the veritable inferno eating its way into the rocky fissure, the remnants of gridbugs fizzling into clouds of voxel ash.

"Holy shit ... " Sam rasped, mesmirised, before remembering the cause of the destruction in the first place and scrambling to his feet. "Tron!" he called frantically, trying to squint against the glare and search the flickering shadows, cursing the black suits of standard security wear and vowing to make them all switch to Siren-white. "Tron, you bastard, you better still be alive so that I can kill you myself - !"

It was becoming an unfortunate habit that Sam had to track Tron down by the sound of his laughter, but for once, it sounded less mad and more like the best thing he had ever heard in his life. Barely registering the aches and pains of new bruises and sprains, he double-timed it, finally pinpointing the sound's source to a limp shape spread upon the ground.

Tron was on his back, one arm flung out, the other resting by his side, one leg folded under the other and looking like a ragdoll that someone had let fall carelessly to the floor. Stress-fractures laced one lower leg and the curve of a hip, and the original crack near his shoulder had deepened. But otherwise, for someone who had flown an overloaded lightcycle into a gridbug hive and then landed what must have been at least a thirty foot drop, he looked and sounded in amazing shape - enough that Sam had to tell himself firmly that the program was still considered wounded and a punch to the face was not considered medicinal in its strictest definition.

" _Disc_ ," he demanded, snapping his fingers as he crouched down by the still weakly cackling program.

"Don't know," Tron had the temerity to shrug, his good shoulder lifting higher than the other, before he pointed out, "Behind you."

Sam whirled on a knee, teeth bared, and took his frustrations out on the few gridbugs still wandering around within the cavern, lost without their swarm and their hive. It did not help his temper in the slightest that Tron had been absolutely right, and that now that the gridbugs have escaped the cavern or been derezzed, they were left with all the time in the world to consider their position.

"Where did you lose your disc?" Sam snarled as soon as stomped back. As he was cleaning up, the program had levered himself up to a seated position, left arm cradled loosely in his lap, damaged leg half-extended before him.

"Does it really matter right now - "

"Of course it matters! Just look at you! If I'm going to repair you - "

"We'll find it. Just give me some patches for now and - "

"I am _not_ going to just patch you up and send you on your way like - I should just let you hobble all the way back to the city center - "

"Sam," Tron frowned, looking as if he was just realizing that something else was amiss. "Come here."

" - and see if next time you're going to cook up some hare-brained scheme that scraps yet _another_ cycle and leaves you half-mutil - " Sam continued to rant all the way up until something hooked his near ankle and the whole cavern seemed to flip upside down.

He might have had the breath knocked from him when he landed on the cavern floor. Or maybe it was the unrelenting grip twisting the fabric of his collar tight at his throat. But the most likely explanation was the mouth that was suddenly covering his, all nipping teeth and demanding tongue, and he didn't need the entry request keyed against his jugular to part his lips and _fuck_ when had Tron had the time to research how to user-kiss like _this_ ...

"Bastard!" Sam broke their lip-lock with a hiss, slapping away the hand still busily tapping at the vulnerable skin of his throat. "Don't think you can sweet-talk your way out of this one - "

The program's eyes slitted with silent laughter, bright with untapped energy, reflecting unearthly blue in the hive's destruction. "I will let you discipline me as you wish when we return, but surely there are more ... pressing needs at the moment?"

With a growl, Sam shoved Tron back to the ground, feeling only the slightest twinge of contrition at the program's wince. He rested his hand over the column of the security chief's neck, and Tron stilled - his gaze calmly meeting the user's before he slowly tilted his head back, baring his throat. Sam had to swallow, heat abruptly pooling low in his gut, and tightened his grip in minute warning before he straightened his fingers, sweeping his palm down with languid deliberateness ... and the black suit and its minimalist blue flares melted away with his touch, baring bright-lit traces and smooth skin beneath.

"Why ... " Sam rasped, resting his free hand upon Tron's good shoulder and leaning until the program tensed beneath the pinning weight. His other hand he lifted until just his fingertips remained resting upon the sternum. "Why do you do this to yourself ... " He deliberately avoided the enticing glow of the contacts, tracing around them toward the ugly, pixelated tear, until he hovered just at the ragged edge.

This time, tension pulled at the edges of Tron's gaze, but the program's voice remained as steady as ever when he answered, "It was a calculated risk, and the best odds that - "

The words vanished with a sharp inhale when his fingertip brushed that angry line of misaligned voxels, and Sam spread his palm over the nearest circuit in apology even as he growled, "For who? The best odds for _who_ , Tron? 'Cause from where I was watching, those were some pretty shitty numbers for _you_ \- "

"Sam," the program hissed, expression tight as if with pain even as light flushed purple beneath his touch, and Tron raised his own hand to drag fingertips lightly down the center of Sam's face - forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks, mouth. "You can patch me. You can retrieve me. You've _already_ retrieved me, once before. But you? Who can patch or retrieve a user?"

And Sam gritted his teeth, felt something roil deep inside at the reminder of just why he was here in the first place, of why he had been here for _hundreds_ of microcycles already, and hated the way his voice shook as he whispered, "That's not fair."

"No," Tron agreed, voice flat and expression grieving. "No, it's not. But neither of us have had much acquaintance with fairness, have we?"

There were a hundred things that he wanted to say, a thousand words pressing against the back of his teeth, all clamoring to be let out and Sam couldn't find the end of the string that would allow it all to be unraveled. He nearly sobbed with the effort of trying to make sense of it all, and when there was the lightest touch against his jaw, a gentle query of [status check] pressed there, he broke - captured Tron's mouth with a hungry sound and dragged his hand down the long, lean line of the program's belly, scraping away suit and across circuits so that Tron arched with a keen that Sam swallowed.

Sam could sense the glow of light pressing against his lids, but did not bother opening his eyes. He had collected every poster and memorabilia for his father's games, had cherished the action figure until he had worn the paint bald in places. He could recall each dot and crook of slender lines drawn upon the original Tron ... and by touch alone, he began to trace them all, feeling the static-spark of the life within pulse and heat beneath his fingertips.

If he were less charitable, he might have tagged the sound Tron made as a mewl. The program writhed beneath him, his good hand clenched in Sam's jacket and no longer keying endearments or queries or fucking saucy ripostes. He flattened his hand to palm the strong, smooth line of Tron's hip, when the program suddenly stiffened and broke away with a hiss, and he pulled back as if burned, suddenly remembering the cracks there ...

"No," Tron gasped, _begged_ , eyes cat-bright and his grip shifting, pulling, until Sam had to catch himself with a hand on each side before he simply sprawled across the program's length. "No, don't stop, please - "

"You're _hurt_ - " Sam began to protest, startling himself with how hoarse he sounded, before his next breath escaped as little more than a helpless whimper when Tron caught him looking and tilted his head back ... lowered his gaze and parted his lips just so ... and _stretched_ that perfectly coded body with its markings like tribal tattoos and the fresh signs of successful battle still painted on his chest and flank ...

Sam's suit derezzed so rapidly it vanished in a veritable puff of flat pixels. " _Fine_ ," he snarled, with only enough time to wonder if he was the one taking or giving in, before he buried a hand in that dark, swept hair, skirted the damage to cup his other hand beneath one firm buttock, and nuzzled up beneath the program's jaw, sucking sharply just as he ground himself against the body laid out beneath him ...

He lost a nanocycle or five, only able to retrieve the sensation of a blissed-out burn when attempting to access that time, and sensations only crowded in afterwards by intermittent surges. The almost painful pound of his heart ... someone's cry still ringing in his ears. Burning lines scraped into his back, and a too-tight grip on his shoulder -

And he was only beginning to realize, with slow, limping wonder, that this was probably the only time in which Tron would simply lie back and take it. That the _program_ was the one vulnerable now ... and Sam shivered even as he kissed the pulse-point in the program's throat, his hold tightening; possessive.

[Caches cleared, polling ... ] was scraped into his back even as Tron shuddered and hissed his name in encouragement, boldly flexing a leg so that Sam's became entangled with his and sweet jesus they were aligned perfectly now like two pieces snapping together and Tron ground  _up_ with a greedy moan that had Sam nearly biting straight through his tongue at the sweet frisson of pleasure that crackled up his spine -

Okay, so maybe Tron was vulnerable, but he wasn't _helpless_.

But on better days, he would never have been pushed back by the mere press of Sam's hand, and he would never have looked so _desperate_ , left to wait for the user's will - which was already vastly eroded, thank you very much - rather than imposing his own. Sam struggled to calm himself with a few quick breaths, _shaking_ with the need to just rub himself off as quickly as possible, and it didn't help at all that Tron looked like he would do anything for the same opportunity with his blown eyes and bitten lip and the sharp pants for air that he didn't even strictly need.

"Tron ... Tron, hold on a moment ... " he gasped, closing his eyes on that too tempting sight and burying his nose in the vulnerable line of the program's throat again. The electric tang of ozone from the nearby damage only sharpened his need to painful proportions, and the security program whined when Sam's fingers dug involuntarily into flesh and circuits. "No, wait ... let me do this for you ... please? You're always - I want to - "

He wasn't at all sure what a program - even one as well versed in user ways as Tron - would be able to pick up amidst his broken mumblings, but after a half dozen nanocycles, there was one last, fine tremor ... and then the body beneath him relaxed, releasing itself into a languor that had Sam shifting instinctively to mold himself to.

It was no longer conflagration to match lines and traces. The heat was banked to just this side of uncomfortable, like the sweet pressure of teeth that bit just deeply enough to remind one of their edge. Sam finally dared to lift his head, steeled himself as he sought out Tron's expression - and felt his chest constrict suddenly for an entirely different reason. A shaky swallow, a whispered reassurance, and Sam sealed the promise with a brush of his lips over the strong line of jaw before he lowered his head ... and laved his tongue directly over the center square of the security program's signature icon.

Tron bucked beneath him with a choked off howl, fingers abruptly buried - too tight - in his hair, but Sam did not pause; simply breathed in that clean, sharp scent like the snap before a thunderstorm hits, let that odd sizzle of conflicting tastes and textures roll over his tongue, and nursed the sensitive patch until the program was unconsciously pleading [ ... override ... override ... ] before he moved on.

It was an exercise in torture, and he had to wonder who was getting the worse end of the deal. He was still fresh enough to the program side of things that sometimes Tron flinched - _too much_ \- and then at other times was impatient - _too little_ \- and sometimes _he_ had to take a break because he was riding too close to the edge, senses flooded by heat and hard, sleek lines and the shattered, needy sounds that the program was making.

But, apparently, he managed to get enough things right that they were balancing in his favor, because by the time he had exhausted his imagination the program was strung tight as piano wire, vibrating and ready to snap, and that original, awful look of bewilderment and endurance - as if the offer was so rare, so against his grain, that it required all of the program's attention to lower caution and defenses enough to accept it, even from an ally - was now replaced by raw, open, unfettered need.

Sam hovered, gulping, feeling his skin burn fever-sensitive and almost dizzy with the satisfaction of what he had reduced the normally indomitable program to. There was the temptation to string it out just a little bit longer ... to finally step over rather than just toe that fine line between pleasure and pain ... he could let everything cycle down one more time before bringing it up that final notch and see if he could just make everything _snap_ ...

Except that he could feel the beginnings of a plea against his skin, aborted partway, and that strong profile turned away with closed eyes and mouth fallen open in a last, desperate bid to endure ... and he leaned over quickly to forestall that appalling habit to simply persevere without complaint, and pressed his cheek to Tron's as he whispered hoarsely, "Ready?"

He completed the circuit. Let the perfect storm finally rage through, unchecked. Even from behind his lids, the world seemed to flare into incandescence, and he felt as if he was caught in the ocean rollers that always lurked just off-shore, tumbled end over end without knowing what was up and what was down while his lungs felt alternately constricted, then bursting. All his nerves were lit afire as the feedback scraped through again and again, hollowing him out with each passing, until he thought he was left with a shell so brittle he might simply fly apart and ruin all of Alan's hard work ...

Tron was panting; wrecked, ragged gasps. In that fragile, tenuous moment, when senses were only just starting to stagger back online but the last of the rebound was still reverberating through them both, Sam could more _feel_ the dry, hitching breaths than hear the muffled sounds. He tried to tug Tron closer with limbs that felt clumsy and fat with exhaustion; probably succeeded as the program's breath caught, then began to ease. He huffed as soft, wayward wisps of hair tickled his nose, and found it easier to invisi-key, [All secure] than to speak.

There was no hesitation this time. Tron didn't even bother finishing the sloppy acknowledgment he was pressing into Sam's ribs before he slipped into standby, and Sam swallowed before he tightened his hold on the slack, unresisting form.


End file.
